Printer ink and toner has become a booming business over the last ten years and has continued to be a thriving industry despite the digital age of things. Companies, schools, households, sole proprietors, and other organizations that make up our workforce have always heavily relied on creating physical copies to be filed for easy perennial reference. From the initial documents that were filled out when you were hired to the last papers in your exit (retirement) package, and all the everyday record keeping that goes along with it in between, everyone of us uses a lot of printed paper; not only throughout our lifetime, but on a daily basis as well. We even receive mail six days out of the week consisting of weekly ads and other monthly statements or subscriptions. We are literally surrounded by printed media; just take a look around when you are inside of any human dwelling. Chances are you’ll find several items that have been created with a printing machine.

Printed media has inevitably become part of our everyday lives and remains to be an established and common way to communicate. But how much does it cost us to print out a document or photograph? When page yields are displayed, the tests are generally with 5% ink or toner coverage which comes out to a fairly sparse amount of textual information on a page or an even smaller picture spanning slightly more than 4 inches by 4 inches in size.

At 5% ink / toner coverage most cartridges will be pretty affordable usually ranging from just under 1 cent per printout to upwards of 20 cents per printout depending on the printer model and the ink or toner cartridges being used. Additionally, using laser toner is often more cost efficient, especially when creating multiple copies of a single page because the same impression can be used multiple times helping to reuse any missed or extra toner on the drum or belt, kind of like a stamp.

Taking a look at some advertised costs of printing, a Canon PGI225bk black inkjet cartridge used in several Canon PIXMA printers at 5% ink coverage, will cost roughly 5 cents per printout with the OEM or Genuine cartridge. Our Remanufactured Canon PGI225bk black inkjet cartridge, used with the same printers will print the same document for about 2 cents per page. With an Epson Stylus Photo T009201 color inkjet cartridge, printing costs will average around 8.5 cents per printout at 5% ink coverage with a genuine cartridge. Similarly our Remanufactured Epson T009201 color inkjet cartridge will cost around 3 cents per printout, when printing the same image with the same printer. Moreover, the prominent Brother TN450 toner cartridges will cost around 2 cents per printout using genuine cartridges and around 1 cent per printed page with our Compatible Brother TN450 toner cartridges. But how often do we use such a scarce amount of ink or toner.

When printing text documents, most of the time we only use around 5 – 10 % ink coverage, leaving the black ink and toners appropriately marked for printing text documents. Although, printing documents with smaller font and full text pages is generally closer to 10% which would cut the page yield total in half and increase printing costs by double the amount. So the previously mentioned Canon Pixma PGI225BK ink cartridges which cost 5 cents per printout using genuine cartridges and 2 cents using Remanufactured cartridges would actually cost more closely to 10 cents per text document with Genuine cartridges and around 4 cents with Remanufactured cartridges. Moreover, these cartridges are advertised to produce or yield around 340 pages which would lower to somewhere closer to 170 pages. Printing an image or photograph, on the other hand, will generally need about 20 to 50 percent ink coverage which will greatly alter your page yield totals and in turn, will raise the average cost per printout.

PC Magazine released an article entitled The True Cost of Ink, which comes to the conclusion that we print with 35 to 50 percent coverage on an average 8 x 10 inch photograph printout, which is about 7.5 to 10 times greater than the tested average. The 35 to 50 percent coverage is also per cartridge since the CMY colors and black ink work in harmony to layer each color on substrates generating about 150 to 200 percent total ink coverage.

So if you’re printing photographs or detailed images, a better representation of the printing cost would be to multiply the advertised or retail cost per printout by 7.5 to 10. Therefore, the user printing 8 x 10 inch photographs that uses the Epson T009201 cartridges for their Stylus printer will spend around 85 cents per printout using the genuine cartridges and about 30 cents per printout using our Remanufactured cartridges. To print ten photographs, you are looking at an ink cost of $8.50 with OEM or genuine ink cartridges and around $3.00 with Remanufactured cartridges. Also note that paper and power costs have not been added to the cost per printout.

With the prevalence and popularity of printing, the brand name manufacturers have been able to set ridiculously high prices for their replacement cartridges. This is in part because the manufacturers try to monopolize the supplies compatible with each machine and in part because we have created a need to see and handle physical copies to confirm data. Over the past few years, we’ve had a push to make everything “green,” or digital but how many times does a company also send a physical copy or how many times have you printed an email confirmation you received. We like to have information at our fingertips but don’t always want to power up a phone or digital device to access the programs storing our needed information.

To determine if you are paying too much for ink, you must first determine the type of printing you most frequently contribute to. Are you printing photographs, text documents, graphical data, blue prints, or small images with text? If you mostly print small images and small amounts of text, the advertised costs and page yields will be accurate. With blue prints and graphical data, you should increase the cost of printing by 2 to 5 times, circumstantially dividing the page yield by the same amount for a more accurate representation. Printing photographs can be tricky, since the size and detail of the picture matter. Printing a full page borderless photograph will use up to 400% ink coverage, significantly more than the 5% being tested.

Also, brand name printer manufacturers work hard to ensure their products will only be usable in their machines and can require specific cartridges and papers to be used together for longer lasting results. Compatible and Remanufactured ink and toner cartridges are made to be used with these printers but can produce a different hue or shade of color. Using third party ink and toner will greatly reduce the cost of printing by an average of 50% or half, but they can also lower the tonal quality when printing out photos. The Compatible and Remanufactured ink and toner cartridges are ideal for text or business graphs, helping to save companies, offices, and other printing environments a lot of money.